The Anderson article doesn't say that about Akamai. It says:
It apparently decided to risk whatever goodwill it had built up on its attempt to drive a hard bargain that would put Level 3 in a better position than content delivery network competitors like Akamai and Limelight.
Anderson doesn't cite any actual agreement. Anderson's article takes the position that L3 is trying to get better terms than it's bound by, but the article doesn't indicate either what terms it's actually bound by, or what terms Akamai is bound by. I find Anderson's article to read like it's biased against L3, because it decides L3 is exclusively the bad guy, but gives only very incomplete descriptions of the circumstances.
We're not really in the fringes, nor in one of the emptiest, coldest or darkest parts. Though even if we were, there would still be probably many many other planets with conditions just like ours. Life on Earth proves that life is possible on a planet with conditions like Earth's. Enough planets like Earth means that however small the probability, there will be life somewhere, and no reason to believe that it would be in only one planet. We have no info on whether even one other planet like ours lacks life. There is no reason to believe the Earth is exceptional at all in having life, though there is no reason to believe that it's anything but unique. And the fairly common condition of Earth's place in the galaxy is immaterial. The Earth's conditions are fairly moderate, but there's a vast amount places and a large range of conditions that are also moderate. Without knowing all the critical factors in the development of life on Earth, we don't know how many other places match them, even if they also have other conditions alien to Earth but irrelevant to the presence of life.
Indeed this discovery of arsenic DNA life on Earth means the possible conditions for life on any planet are wider than we previously believed, which is why it is important.
It's not absurd that life exists on Earth, because it does exist. Any absurdity would be in the invalid expectations that life wouldn't exist here.
We might or might not be the exception. All we know for sure is that life certainly exists here. The self-defining nature of that one sure fact tells us a lot about the limitations of our search for life elsewhere.
I will not be surprised to learn that Level 3 is also shaking down Comcast. But to return to our original disagreement in this thread, that wouldn't mean that this is not a shakedown. Indeed, that would mean that there is a shakedown going on at both sides of the table, two of them, not none. But that's a semantic disagreement (though your objection was to the semantics).
The essence of the issue is what Comcast is charging Level 3 for the extra traffic. Primarily, is that amount enough to change whether Netflix content is competitive with Comcast's own offerings? If it is, then is that amount unusually high, in addition to being prohibitive?
I don't know the answer to those two questions. Level 3 didn't respond to the analysis in that ARSTechnica article, so I don't have the answer. Silence doesn't indicate failure, since this is indeed a contract dispute, and either party might gain more or less by publicly engaging specific claims, or omitting context or other details.
But I am suspicious of their agreements specifying only settlement-free traffic rates, that require roughly net-zero up vs down traffic between L3 and Comcast. Because Comcast's network serves endpoints that are mostly net consumers who upload URLs and maybe POP/IMAP commands but download audio, video and email with attachments small and large. I expect there is a rate already specified for L3 paying Comcast for downloads like Netflix that exceed, even by a large amount, "roughly net-zero". That would be the "paid peering" agreement linked from Comcast's SFI policy linked from the ARSTechnica article.
So I expect that Comcast and L3 already have a paid peering agreement. I don't know whether its rates are different from what Comcast is now charging for the increased traffic. I don't know whether there's a maximum traffic limit, or any other accommodation for unforeseen increase in L3 traffic to Comcast enough to increase Comcast's costs to support the traffic, like building out Comcast's network. If there is no maximum, then Comcast made a bad deal but should have to stick to it - that's how contracts and business risks work. If Comcast is charging a rate for this new traffic that's different from what the existing paid peering agreement specifies, I'd need to know whether there's any other agreement specifying that rate for that amount of traffic.
It's possible that there is no agreement in place that covers this new amount of traffic. In which case Comcast might have the legal right to charge whatever it wants for the new traffic. But just because there is a right to shakedown doesn't mean it's not a shakedown, or that a shakedown is acceptable - either to L3 (which wouldn't really matter - that's how contracts work) or to the FCC (which would matter, because there's a public interest in this scenario being fair to competition). Since the result of this dispute will set a precedent for whether a network like Comcast can set prohibitive costs for traffic that competes with its own offerings, that means that the FCC has to protect the public interest in competition.
Again, either or both L3 and Comcast could be shaking the other down. L3 could be trying to force Comcast to carry traffic under the SFI agreement that the SFI excludes. Comcast could be trying to charge L3 more than specified in an existing paid peering agreement that's covered under it. Or both Comcast and L3 failed to create an agreement beforehand that covers this traffic, and Comcast could be charging prohibitive amount that is not necessary - or L3 could be trying to pay an amount less than what isn't prohibitive but what is necessary. The FCC can and should get the answers to those questions of where the boundaries are. But even when it's undefined, the FCC must defend the principle that Comcast cannot force L3 to agree to pay more to carry that traffic than what Comcast's competing traffic costs Comcast to carry, which would unfairly compete.
The trojan doesn't have to be so crudely delivered so late in the supply chain. The printer could have trojan SW installed in it, attacking a host PC (and then the rest of the network) over USB, or the network directly when connected over ethernet. The printer manufacturer, or many of its OEMs, could build them to attack anyone, or specific targets among the many installations they're sleeping in. Or a government could build them in, like if the US had succeeded in requiring a Clipper chip installed in all devices and had sourced the chips from a government-controlled manufacturer. Or similarly with either a Chinese competitor to DVD, or just Chinese manufactured chips of any kind that the Chinese government could force local manufacturers to include, possibly without knowing the trojan is inside. Or by any country, which can force manufacturers to include tech in their products and keep it secret.
In fact I'd be surprised to somehow learn that this manner of delivering trojans has never been done, and that all of everyone's machines are free of them.
The government is regulating ISPs, and that's where it should regulate Comcast. The government can require that Comcast's ISP does not interfere with services from competitors that compete with Comcast's own products, whether Comcast's competing products are delivered over the ISP or over the cable TV system.
I'm not so interested in independent municipal fiber systems that are owned by the municipality, except where used by the municipality to pressure private networks into delivering good private networks to compete with it (and then privatizing the municipal network once competition producing quality is achieved). I advised NYC's City Council (legislature) on that very issue, and have seen both good reasons for and good results from that kind of market participation. In areas where there is really only one broadband network there is a case for it, but even better is competing broadband networks, even if one must be provided by the public to achieve that.
In the absence of any broadband network, the government has a role in creating one or stimulating private owners to create competing ones. Which means spreading the cost of connecting everyone to it among everyone, even if some (or even most) of those people don't want to pay, and would rather not have it if they have to pay. Because universal (or close to it) broadband access is necessary for the US to compete, and gradually even to function, even if some people refuse to believe that or accept their responsibility in it. That was the case with rural electrification, then with rural telephones, then with rural highways, probably also with rural water/sewer. In every case the government has had to lead, and force people to follow. Yet even with that consistent history, and the obviousness of the value of investing in universal broadband, there are still lots of people who will refuse to participate. Probably because they can insist on a free ride, as they have always gotten before.
What is essential to the public welfare is equal access to broadband. Private networks have had literally decades, full of subsidies, including getting an entire booming Internet handed to it without risk of starting it up until after its value was proven, to get there. But they always refuse, too lazy, protected and incompetent to deliver on anything but the lowest hanging fruit, though busy protecting the higher hanging fruit from getting touched by any possible competitor, and even busier excluding any new possible competitor from entering the market at all. That is where the government must act: ensuring the services are delivered adequately to serve the public's essential interests. But only so much action as is actually required to get the private interests to continue the momentum.
I prefer that the government break up monopolies like Comcast, rather than set the prices used by monopolies to protect their monopoly and its abuses. The same reasons (and legal precedents) for prohibiting AT&T to operate both local loops and long distance networks stacked vertically should prohibit Comcast from operating its network and competing on that network with other applications and content, like phone and movie products.
Indeed the Microsoft monopoly verdict should have been remedied by forcing Microsoft to break up vertically, along lines between OS, app, development, network, content and hardware.
When a single owner doesn't have control over the whole stack, there's a lot more competition, choices, efficiency and innovation. That is the level playing field the market can use to best serve the people in it. Without government substituting central planning for commerce.
Net Neutrality doesn't have anything to do with not charging for traffic.
Precisely. That is how we can logically say that "Net Neutrality is not a toll road".
What the FCC can, and should, prohibit is price gouging by networks with a monopoly on access between endpoints and other networks, like Comcast's (and other cablecos and telcos). Just as the FCC protected consumers and competitive networks from telco monopolization of DSL installations (until telcos scammed their way back into monopoly).
Nobody said traffic should be $free. What Net Neutrality says is that network operators shouldn't make access to traffic prohibitively expensive when there's no alternative to those operators. Especially when the traffic is being blocked as a way of protecting from competition with the network operator's own product traffic, as Comcast is now clearly demonstrating.
But then the public would be paying for a resource that makes private parties $BILLIONS each year, subsidizing them. A utility like water/sewer/trains that only suffers waste is justified in being run by the public, because it's inevitably a monopoly due to its physical nature. But the Internet can just be regulated to ensure equal access instead of monopoly/cartel control. That is where the balance is best struck.
Peering disputes within the context of regulated access neutrality can be resolved without holding people hostage. That's what we should have in a productive info market.
I know, but I post more for the benefit of people who don't already understand these matters than I do for those who agree with me already because they do understand.
Or, for that matter, for the benefit of people who so badly misunderstand these matters that I must correct them in public, because those people usually don't want to understand. They typically just want to decree their point and have others accept them by magic - usually backed up by a tide of propaganda.
So that's why the US shouldn't prosecute its torturers? Because the US is better than other countries? Doesn't failing to prosecute torturers make us worse?
You're right about America. But America is by no means unique in that. You're describing pathological nationalism. The UK has it, France has it; Israel has it; most nations have it to some degree, and practically every nation has had it some time in history even worse than the US does. China has it worse; most tribes have it; most religious sects have it.
It's probably easier to list which nations/groups don't have it. In fact, other than those countries (ie. African and Latin American) beat down so long by those countries that have had it for so long so they can't muster it, I can think of only Canada - and it lives in the shadow of the US, which has the most obvious difference between its "equality" rhetoric and its nationalistic actions.
Note again that none of what I said contradicts what you said about America.
You're right. Except that it wasn't just America's banks and consumers. It was practically all of the banks in the entire developed world, and about as large a percentage of their consumers as well in most cases (some more, some less than the US). Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain are not the US, but they were roughly as guilty, and in even more over their heads. The less developed world might be less guilty of this specific problem, but that's because it had less to steal - because its financial systems and banks are even worse than the ones in the developed world.
It's not "everyone's fault" (I for one have no guilt), but it's not "America's fault". You are drawing the categories in the wrong dimension.
And the network upstream from Comcast also pays Comcast to send and receive its Internet traffic from wherever it chooses to send and receive it from. And so on upstream until the traffic reaches Netflix, which pays its ISP(s) for the same service.
Net Neutrality is not a toll road. It's Comcast's private toll road that violates Net Neutrality. US rivers are not toll roads, either private or public, for exactly the reason we see Comcast exploiting in the absence of Net Neutrality.
If a Comcast customer set up a proxy server at some cheap:bandwidth hosting company, they could get Netflix data sent to the proxy, encrypted there, then sent down to their home (and the reverse for requests). A simple passphrase and XOR could make the encryption extremely low overhead, and easily set up over ssh or SSL. These hosts can cost as little as $10 a month but be reliable, which added to Netflix's charges is still cheaper than paying for Comcast TV.
And indeed all traffic could be routed through that simple VPN, protecting everything from Comcast's prying, now that Comcast has proven (again) that it cannot be trusted. Email, web, IM, everything.
That's the principle. What's the current best software to set up the proxy at the host and at the LAN?
Yeah, because taking their funds away would help them do a better job. Seriously, you can't have it both ways. We whine about the job they do, and yet we whine about the cost and want them to do more with less.
I didn't say to take their funds away. In fact, I didn't say anything about what to do. You did, a straw man for you to complain about.
What they should do is fund science and industry programmes fully, and cut the ridiculous waste in intel budgets. Specifically we should fund a solar base on the Moon with satellite relays to ocean platforms, with shuttles to service it, while cutting the military + intel budgets to $300B tops. But other science and industry priorities are also OK. NASA should have a $50B annual budget, or more if that's what it takes to get either the Lunar base or something else of comparable value by 2020.
Now that I've actually said what they should do, you can feel free to agree or disagree.
I'm now going to repeat myself rebutting some of your points. You're not even grasping the plain point's I'm posting, but you're replying with a smartass tone. It's annoying.
I explained how futurism is different from science fiction, and that it's not very different - though the differences are meaningful. Both SF and futurism do help the vast majority of people who don't think about the future. Not by getting them to do it, but by getting other people to think about the future of others, and incorporating that in their plans. People actually innovating also typically think about the future only in the narrowest ways and with the shortest horizons.
I didn't define futurists as people who appoint themselves as moderators of the discussion of the future. I said they are people who discuss the future, and that other people opt to listen to them. They enforce no control over that discussion, except what's appointed them by their audience.
That article criticizing Kurzweil struggles to find fault with him. Its criticism of his 1990 prediction about the universality of the Internet talks like the French system, which was like CompuServe though a public utility, was the Internet - though it wasn't, any more than CompuServe or other timesharing discussion boards were. It mainly criticizes Kurzweil's too-accelerated timelines, not the actual predictions themselves, and Kurzweil's reported resistance to admitting his timing predictions were off. Kurzweil's predictions are still too current to accurately asses in context - we're so bad at futurism or even digesting the present that we need plenty of past to see developments in any accurate context. But before him, the most famous futurist was probably Alvin Toffler, who wrote books like Future Shock (he invented that term). In retrospect he looks prophetic, and indeed looked that way usually as his predictions came true. He was less likely to hang specific years on predictions. But he was also predicting a less complex set of changes, to a smaller, more uniform and centrally powerful audience of industrialists. Toffler is considered to be extremely successful, now that we can judge most of his predictions whose time has come and gone. By those measures, Kurzweil is pretty successful. And by just getting people to think about the future, even just to prove him wrong, his work is valuable.
Where are these people who think about the future on their own?
Even just the next few years when their adjustable rate mortgage jumps to over 10%. Or when having a half dozen drinks when they're driving themselves home in a couple of hours. Or when they change lanes without looking. Or when developing a product, apart from (possibly) the immediate revenue in the next quarter or two. Thinking about the future is very rare.
Really, where do you live and work, where they think about the future in more than the most superficial way, or apart from what someone else gets them to do.
And that, children, is why Chinese people were always in better health than everyone else, especially Europeans and Americans.
Except they weren't. Lame how you discredited your otherwise insightful comment with some sinocentrism. That kind of arrogance is one of the worst diseases possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I know. That's why I linked to that stupid song.
No, the word you want is "moronic", because none of that is irony.
How is that "ironic"?
The Anderson article doesn't say that about Akamai. It says:
Anderson doesn't cite any actual agreement. Anderson's article takes the position that L3 is trying to get better terms than it's bound by, but the article doesn't indicate either what terms it's actually bound by, or what terms Akamai is bound by. I find Anderson's article to read like it's biased against L3, because it decides L3 is exclusively the bad guy, but gives only very incomplete descriptions of the circumstances.
We're not really in the fringes, nor in one of the emptiest, coldest or darkest parts. Though even if we were, there would still be probably many many other planets with conditions just like ours. Life on Earth proves that life is possible on a planet with conditions like Earth's. Enough planets like Earth means that however small the probability, there will be life somewhere, and no reason to believe that it would be in only one planet. We have no info on whether even one other planet like ours lacks life. There is no reason to believe the Earth is exceptional at all in having life, though there is no reason to believe that it's anything but unique. And the fairly common condition of Earth's place in the galaxy is immaterial. The Earth's conditions are fairly moderate, but there's a vast amount places and a large range of conditions that are also moderate. Without knowing all the critical factors in the development of life on Earth, we don't know how many other places match them, even if they also have other conditions alien to Earth but irrelevant to the presence of life.
Indeed this discovery of arsenic DNA life on Earth means the possible conditions for life on any planet are wider than we previously believed, which is why it is important.
It's not absurd that life exists on Earth, because it does exist. Any absurdity would be in the invalid expectations that life wouldn't exist here.
We might or might not be the exception. All we know for sure is that life certainly exists here. The self-defining nature of that one sure fact tells us a lot about the limitations of our search for life elsewhere.
I will not be surprised to learn that Level 3 is also shaking down Comcast. But to return to our original disagreement in this thread, that wouldn't mean that this is not a shakedown. Indeed, that would mean that there is a shakedown going on at both sides of the table, two of them, not none. But that's a semantic disagreement (though your objection was to the semantics).
The essence of the issue is what Comcast is charging Level 3 for the extra traffic. Primarily, is that amount enough to change whether Netflix content is competitive with Comcast's own offerings? If it is, then is that amount unusually high, in addition to being prohibitive?
I don't know the answer to those two questions. Level 3 didn't respond to the analysis in that ARSTechnica article, so I don't have the answer. Silence doesn't indicate failure, since this is indeed a contract dispute, and either party might gain more or less by publicly engaging specific claims, or omitting context or other details.
But I am suspicious of their agreements specifying only settlement-free traffic rates, that require roughly net-zero up vs down traffic between L3 and Comcast. Because Comcast's network serves endpoints that are mostly net consumers who upload URLs and maybe POP/IMAP commands but download audio, video and email with attachments small and large. I expect there is a rate already specified for L3 paying Comcast for downloads like Netflix that exceed, even by a large amount, "roughly net-zero". That would be the "paid peering" agreement linked from Comcast's SFI policy linked from the ARSTechnica article.
So I expect that Comcast and L3 already have a paid peering agreement. I don't know whether its rates are different from what Comcast is now charging for the increased traffic. I don't know whether there's a maximum traffic limit, or any other accommodation for unforeseen increase in L3 traffic to Comcast enough to increase Comcast's costs to support the traffic, like building out Comcast's network. If there is no maximum, then Comcast made a bad deal but should have to stick to it - that's how contracts and business risks work. If Comcast is charging a rate for this new traffic that's different from what the existing paid peering agreement specifies, I'd need to know whether there's any other agreement specifying that rate for that amount of traffic.
It's possible that there is no agreement in place that covers this new amount of traffic. In which case Comcast might have the legal right to charge whatever it wants for the new traffic. But just because there is a right to shakedown doesn't mean it's not a shakedown, or that a shakedown is acceptable - either to L3 (which wouldn't really matter - that's how contracts work) or to the FCC (which would matter, because there's a public interest in this scenario being fair to competition). Since the result of this dispute will set a precedent for whether a network like Comcast can set prohibitive costs for traffic that competes with its own offerings, that means that the FCC has to protect the public interest in competition.
Again, either or both L3 and Comcast could be shaking the other down. L3 could be trying to force Comcast to carry traffic under the SFI agreement that the SFI excludes. Comcast could be trying to charge L3 more than specified in an existing paid peering agreement that's covered under it. Or both Comcast and L3 failed to create an agreement beforehand that covers this traffic, and Comcast could be charging prohibitive amount that is not necessary - or L3 could be trying to pay an amount less than what isn't prohibitive but what is necessary. The FCC can and should get the answers to those questions of where the boundaries are. But even when it's undefined, the FCC must defend the principle that Comcast cannot force L3 to agree to pay more to carry that traffic than what Comcast's competing traffic costs Comcast to carry, which would unfairly compete.
The trojan doesn't have to be so crudely delivered so late in the supply chain. The printer could have trojan SW installed in it, attacking a host PC (and then the rest of the network) over USB, or the network directly when connected over ethernet. The printer manufacturer, or many of its OEMs, could build them to attack anyone, or specific targets among the many installations they're sleeping in. Or a government could build them in, like if the US had succeeded in requiring a Clipper chip installed in all devices and had sourced the chips from a government-controlled manufacturer. Or similarly with either a Chinese competitor to DVD, or just Chinese manufactured chips of any kind that the Chinese government could force local manufacturers to include, possibly without knowing the trojan is inside. Or by any country, which can force manufacturers to include tech in their products and keep it secret.
In fact I'd be surprised to somehow learn that this manner of delivering trojans has never been done, and that all of everyone's machines are free of them.
The government is regulating ISPs, and that's where it should regulate Comcast. The government can require that Comcast's ISP does not interfere with services from competitors that compete with Comcast's own products, whether Comcast's competing products are delivered over the ISP or over the cable TV system.
I'm not so interested in independent municipal fiber systems that are owned by the municipality, except where used by the municipality to pressure private networks into delivering good private networks to compete with it (and then privatizing the municipal network once competition producing quality is achieved). I advised NYC's City Council (legislature) on that very issue, and have seen both good reasons for and good results from that kind of market participation. In areas where there is really only one broadband network there is a case for it, but even better is competing broadband networks, even if one must be provided by the public to achieve that.
In the absence of any broadband network, the government has a role in creating one or stimulating private owners to create competing ones. Which means spreading the cost of connecting everyone to it among everyone, even if some (or even most) of those people don't want to pay, and would rather not have it if they have to pay. Because universal (or close to it) broadband access is necessary for the US to compete, and gradually even to function, even if some people refuse to believe that or accept their responsibility in it. That was the case with rural electrification, then with rural telephones, then with rural highways, probably also with rural water/sewer. In every case the government has had to lead, and force people to follow. Yet even with that consistent history, and the obviousness of the value of investing in universal broadband, there are still lots of people who will refuse to participate. Probably because they can insist on a free ride, as they have always gotten before.
What is essential to the public welfare is equal access to broadband. Private networks have had literally decades, full of subsidies, including getting an entire booming Internet handed to it without risk of starting it up until after its value was proven, to get there. But they always refuse, too lazy, protected and incompetent to deliver on anything but the lowest hanging fruit, though busy protecting the higher hanging fruit from getting touched by any possible competitor, and even busier excluding any new possible competitor from entering the market at all. That is where the government must act: ensuring the services are delivered adequately to serve the public's essential interests. But only so much action as is actually required to get the private interests to continue the momentum.
I prefer that the government break up monopolies like Comcast, rather than set the prices used by monopolies to protect their monopoly and its abuses. The same reasons (and legal precedents) for prohibiting AT&T to operate both local loops and long distance networks stacked vertically should prohibit Comcast from operating its network and competing on that network with other applications and content, like phone and movie products.
Indeed the Microsoft monopoly verdict should have been remedied by forcing Microsoft to break up vertically, along lines between OS, app, development, network, content and hardware.
When a single owner doesn't have control over the whole stack, there's a lot more competition, choices, efficiency and innovation. That is the level playing field the market can use to best serve the people in it. Without government substituting central planning for commerce.
Precisely. That is how we can logically say that "Net Neutrality is not a toll road".
What the FCC can, and should, prohibit is price gouging by networks with a monopoly on access between endpoints and other networks, like Comcast's (and other cablecos and telcos). Just as the FCC protected consumers and competitive networks from telco monopolization of DSL installations (until telcos scammed their way back into monopoly).
Nobody said traffic should be $free. What Net Neutrality says is that network operators shouldn't make access to traffic prohibitively expensive when there's no alternative to those operators. Especially when the traffic is being blocked as a way of protecting from competition with the network operator's own product traffic, as Comcast is now clearly demonstrating.
But then the public would be paying for a resource that makes private parties $BILLIONS each year, subsidizing them. A utility like water/sewer/trains that only suffers waste is justified in being run by the public, because it's inevitably a monopoly due to its physical nature. But the Internet can just be regulated to ensure equal access instead of monopoly/cartel control. That is where the balance is best struck.
Peering disputes within the context of regulated access neutrality can be resolved without holding people hostage. That's what we should have in a productive info market.
Yes, and we should never use the term "war", when "border dispute" would suffice.
We care about the implications of the underlying contractual principle. You might not, but most people do.
It's a peering dispute used as a shakedown.
I know, but I post more for the benefit of people who don't already understand these matters than I do for those who agree with me already because they do understand.
Or, for that matter, for the benefit of people who so badly misunderstand these matters that I must correct them in public, because those people usually don't want to understand. They typically just want to decree their point and have others accept them by magic - usually backed up by a tide of propaganda.
So that's why the US shouldn't prosecute its torturers? Because the US is better than other countries? Doesn't failing to prosecute torturers make us worse?
You're right about America. But America is by no means unique in that. You're describing pathological nationalism. The UK has it, France has it; Israel has it; most nations have it to some degree, and practically every nation has had it some time in history even worse than the US does. China has it worse; most tribes have it; most religious sects have it.
It's probably easier to list which nations/groups don't have it. In fact, other than those countries (ie. African and Latin American) beat down so long by those countries that have had it for so long so they can't muster it, I can think of only Canada - and it lives in the shadow of the US, which has the most obvious difference between its "equality" rhetoric and its nationalistic actions.
Note again that none of what I said contradicts what you said about America.
You're right. Except that it wasn't just America's banks and consumers. It was practically all of the banks in the entire developed world, and about as large a percentage of their consumers as well in most cases (some more, some less than the US). Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain are not the US, but they were roughly as guilty, and in even more over their heads. The less developed world might be less guilty of this specific problem, but that's because it had less to steal - because its financial systems and banks are even worse than the ones in the developed world.
It's not "everyone's fault" (I for one have no guilt), but it's not "America's fault". You are drawing the categories in the wrong dimension.
And the network upstream from Comcast also pays Comcast to send and receive its Internet traffic from wherever it chooses to send and receive it from. And so on upstream until the traffic reaches Netflix, which pays its ISP(s) for the same service.
That's right. And a "shakedown" in the streets is really just a "weapon-underwritten negotiation".
Your downplaying seems unwarranted, unless of course the goal is to protect corporate monopolism.
Net Neutrality is not a toll road. It's Comcast's private toll road that violates Net Neutrality. US rivers are not toll roads, either private or public, for exactly the reason we see Comcast exploiting in the absence of Net Neutrality.
The rest of your comment is accurate, though.
If a Comcast customer set up a proxy server at some cheap:bandwidth hosting company, they could get Netflix data sent to the proxy, encrypted there, then sent down to their home (and the reverse for requests). A simple passphrase and XOR could make the encryption extremely low overhead, and easily set up over ssh or SSL. These hosts can cost as little as $10 a month but be reliable, which added to Netflix's charges is still cheaper than paying for Comcast TV.
And indeed all traffic could be routed through that simple VPN, protecting everything from Comcast's prying, now that Comcast has proven (again) that it cannot be trusted. Email, web, IM, everything.
That's the principle. What's the current best software to set up the proxy at the host and at the LAN?
Yeah, because taking their funds away would help them do a better job. Seriously, you can't have it both ways. We whine about the job they do, and yet we whine about the cost and want them to do more with less.
I didn't say to take their funds away. In fact, I didn't say anything about what to do. You did, a straw man for you to complain about.
What they should do is fund science and industry programmes fully, and cut the ridiculous waste in intel budgets. Specifically we should fund a solar base on the Moon with satellite relays to ocean platforms, with shuttles to service it, while cutting the military + intel budgets to $300B tops. But other science and industry priorities are also OK. NASA should have a $50B annual budget, or more if that's what it takes to get either the Lunar base or something else of comparable value by 2020.
Now that I've actually said what they should do, you can feel free to agree or disagree.
I'm now going to repeat myself rebutting some of your points. You're not even grasping the plain point's I'm posting, but you're replying with a smartass tone. It's annoying.
I explained how futurism is different from science fiction, and that it's not very different - though the differences are meaningful. Both SF and futurism do help the vast majority of people who don't think about the future. Not by getting them to do it, but by getting other people to think about the future of others, and incorporating that in their plans. People actually innovating also typically think about the future only in the narrowest ways and with the shortest horizons.
I didn't define futurists as people who appoint themselves as moderators of the discussion of the future. I said they are people who discuss the future, and that other people opt to listen to them. They enforce no control over that discussion, except what's appointed them by their audience.
That article criticizing Kurzweil struggles to find fault with him. Its criticism of his 1990 prediction about the universality of the Internet talks like the French system, which was like CompuServe though a public utility, was the Internet - though it wasn't, any more than CompuServe or other timesharing discussion boards were. It mainly criticizes Kurzweil's too-accelerated timelines, not the actual predictions themselves, and Kurzweil's reported resistance to admitting his timing predictions were off. Kurzweil's predictions are still too current to accurately asses in context - we're so bad at futurism or even digesting the present that we need plenty of past to see developments in any accurate context. But before him, the most famous futurist was probably Alvin Toffler, who wrote books like Future Shock (he invented that term). In retrospect he looks prophetic, and indeed looked that way usually as his predictions came true. He was less likely to hang specific years on predictions. But he was also predicting a less complex set of changes, to a smaller, more uniform and centrally powerful audience of industrialists. Toffler is considered to be extremely successful, now that we can judge most of his predictions whose time has come and gone. By those measures, Kurzweil is pretty successful. And by just getting people to think about the future, even just to prove him wrong, his work is valuable.
Where are these people who think about the future on their own?
Even just the next few years when their adjustable rate mortgage jumps to over 10%. Or when having a half dozen drinks when they're driving themselves home in a couple of hours. Or when they change lanes without looking. Or when developing a product, apart from (possibly) the immediate revenue in the next quarter or two. Thinking about the future is very rare.
Really, where do you live and work, where they think about the future in more than the most superficial way, or apart from what someone else gets them to do.
And that, children, is why Chinese people were always in better health than everyone else, especially Europeans and Americans.
Except they weren't. Lame how you discredited your otherwise insightful comment with some sinocentrism. That kind of arrogance is one of the worst diseases possible.